Feminine Pressure

I've been thinking about starting a thread like this for a while but since it's International Women's Day today it seems apt to start it now.

The idea is a thread to highlight music written/performed by women, and also to discuss stuff relating to gender in music, such as representation in music, what differences (if any) there are between the music men produce and women create, and so on. And, as alluded to in the title, that notion (expounded upon by Simon Reynolds in e.g. the quote below) of music that women and men (generally) like/dislike, or that has 'masculine' and 'feminine' coding...

'Feminine Pressure is the name of an all-female Garage DJ crew. In a very real sense, UK Garage is organised around the pressure of feminine desire; a key factor in the scene’s emergence was when women defected en masse from the junglist dancefloor, fed up with the melody-and-vocal-devoid bombast of techstep. Two-step Garage bears the same relation to Jungle that lover’s rock did to dub reggae: it’s the feminised counterpart of a “serious” male genre. Like two-step, lover’s rock was a UK-spawned hybrid of silky US soul and Jamaican rhythm that restored treble to the bass-heavy frequency spectrum and replaced militant spirituality with romantic yearning. UK Garage pirate MCs send out shouts to couples cuddling at home (“or even engaged in horizontal activities”). The mic chat can get seriously lewd, in the beyond suggestive, explicit style of modern R&B; on one station I heard an MC rap “to the ladies, undo my zip/and you’ll find I’m well equipped”! There’s even a pirate station called Erotic FM.'

If we are to cautiously agree that women are more at ease with discussing emotions, and therefore more comfortable with the idea of embracing their emotional response to music, then it is logical to assume that the songs which aim for the emotional jugular might appeal more to women than to men. How else to explain James Blunt? This is not to say that men do not have an emotional response to music, rather that the emotion is expressed differently. In Nick Coleman's excellent article about how his partial hearing loss has affected his relationship with music, published in G2 yesterday, he wrote that he had always heard music three-dimensionally, architecturally: "I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion." I would further suggest that the framework of music appreciation, the lists and the cataloguing, the trivia and the multiple copies of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, gives men another kind of structure through which to examine their emotions.

The problem - and it is one exacerbated by Douglas's opposition of "emotional" and "intellectual" responses to music - is that there prevails a notion that to take anything other than a masculine, cataloguing approach to music is a weakness; that loving the way Bob Dylan sings the line "And I was standin' on the side of the road/ Rain fallin' on my shoes" in Tangled Up in Blue is somehow not as important as knowing where he recorded that song (his farm in Minnesota, in the winter of 1974) or countless other facts (that it was originally composed in the key of E, later changed to A, for example). I know these things, but they don't matter that much to me. Should a total recall of labels and recording studios and session musicians and chord changes really be described as "intellectual"? We might just as easily call it "clinical".

This rings true for me as a music nerd - it's a predominantly male word of knowledge acquisition and the competitive demonstration of superior taste. And in terms of how we talk about music, us nerds do tend to be more interested in structure and technique than emotion. Would also help explain the apparent female/male division on techstep, which aside from being extremely aggressive is also fairly monotonous, emotionally speaking. Or perhaps if women are more emotionally receptive, they feel the depressing bleakness of techstep's emotional register more vividly than men for whom it is simply quite a cool and aggressive sound.

I went to this party and it was great. All the DJs were female. And they played the usual Dead by Dawn stuff like breakcore, speedcore and gabba. As usual there were a fair few women in the crowd also.

I don't know what i was thinking creating this thread actually because its bound to turn into a 30 page argument like the its great when you're straight thread

I guess I was just interested in the recent shift I've noticed (perhaps illusory) towards female DJs in house/techno, and wondering if that will in terms of the music actually have an effect, or if it will be more or less the same music as before, only played by a healthy mix of men and women (which I'm all for before you feminazis get started)